Alta used to be a champion fighter. Now, she can’t even lift her sword. After she collapses in the forest, a kindly teashop owner called Boro invites her to join him. Maybe a spell of cozy gardening, cleaning, and making tea for customers will help her feel better? But it’s only an offer. You can go back into the forest at any time.
Obviously, I tried to leave. Firstly because I know how to accurately roleplay a stressed, overly devoted burnout who puts all their value in their vocation. And secondly because, come on. This game was written by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. There’s got to be some kind of secret to ignoring the clear invitation of the game, right?
Not as far as I can tell. The first couple of times you get a little extra chat with Boro, but after that, it’s only Alta’s looping thoughts followed by her inevitable collapse. And, look, I’m willing to be laughed at if it turns out there’s a secret ending for trying 100 times. But, although it might sound contradictory at first, Wanderstop’s attention to detail makes me think there isn’t.
For example, making tea involves scrambling in third-person up and down a complicated contraption, tinkering with all kinds of doodads and gizmos, and then, at the end, pouring the right amount into a cup. This isn’t easy to do, at least at first. One of my early notes reads, “oh god, is there a penalty for spilling this tea?”
Nope! Actually, all the extra goes into feeding the tree that the machine is wrapped around. You know, like when you’re writing and it’s godawful and people say, don’t worry, you’ll be able to come back to it later and it will have informed what actually makes it to publication, so it’s still worthwhile, and you don’t believe them, but unfortunately it is actually true every time and you need to learn to relax and trust the process.
Maybe my somewhat overly specific reading of this particular metaphor gives me away. But the point is, the mechanics of the game are constantly underpinning its central theme. Another example: you can’t pick fruit from the same tree forever. Also: basically every character arc for the customers, which are consistently dense, small-packaged delights. So, no, I think Alta really has no choice but to stay and make tea. You can’t outrun burnout.
It turns out that there’s actually quite a lot to do to run a tea shop. Firstly, you need to collect and dry tea leaves, which grow randomly around the forest clearing. Then you need to garden, making specific fruits by hybridising different coloured seeds. Then there’s the aforementioned contraption. Handling customer requests is a given, but might involve complex multi-step recipes or hybridising fruit again by foraging for mushrooms. Plus there’s cleaning to keep up with, and decorating the shop with your own photographs, and planting flowers in the garden. The radio will even go static if you don’t reset it every so often.
If I have a complaint, it’s that this sometimes works against one of the game’s key claims: that you have an opportunity for downtime here. You can make yourself a cup of tea and sit and enjoy it whenever you want. Doing so is – I almost wrote “valuable,” do you see the issue here? – enjoyable, since you get to learn more about Alta’s history. And very occasionally, there won’t be anything else for you to do, basically forcing you into it. But other than maybe three moments across the 10ish hour game, there’s almost always someone clamouring for a cuppa. There’s no timer counting down or anything, but it’s still hard to feel like you’re resting and recovering and able to do nothing when you have someone waiting.
The biggest upside of there being so much to do is that every bit of it is charming. Stand-out character design and voice-y writing make every customer a joy to talk to. I would die for Boro, so obviously I do want him to have something to say to me at any given moment. And something as simple as sweeping up piles of leaves is taken as an opportunity to give Alta a hilariously violent animation, just in case you forgot that she doesn’t know how to do anything other than beat people up.
You really won’t want to forget that. To say that Wanderstop is simply about burnout is to obfuscate the more complex struggles that Alta is going through. I won’t give any spoilers, but the game is willing to sit in that complexity without flattening its edges. There are things that there aren’t easy fixes for, and it doesn’t shy away from presenting that fact.
Wanderstop is meticulously thought out in both big- and small-picture ways, and that means it isn’t a straightforward game of a girl getting to put her hands in the soil and run a cute little café and be magically fixed. It’s a game that openly admits to not having all of the answers. It’s a game that feels like the process of working through something.